Hi, I always respected Miguel de Icaza's judgment and he always has a good and sane point of view. I am a little troubled about the recent announcement, about the Novell/Microsoft agreement.
Didn't Miguel de Icaza assured us that Mono was safe, that there are no known patents that Mono infringes, that .NET is an ECMA standard, that even if Mono infringes on some patents then the Open Inventions Network will protect it ? Didn't Miguel said that Novell conducted a whole investigation on Microsoft owned patents and no infringed patents where found ? And Novell is the owner of the Unix copyrights (I am no lawyer, so please correct me if I am wrong) ... and Novell just admitted that GNU/Linux has pieces that infringe on Microsoft's intellectual property ? True or not true ... there are many companies that might stand up and demand the same royalties that Microsoft is asking. The solution is to fight the whole software patents system, not getting around it by a minor deal with the devil himself. What if companies like IBM or Oracle or Apple take a stand and demand the same thing ? Miguel says in his blog something like: "So today we have secured a peace of mind for Novell customers that might have been worried about possible patent infringements open source deployments" But doesn't anyone at Novell notice that the REST of the open-source landscape is now in a greater danger than before ? Frankly ... nobody gives a shit about Mono as a comercial product, Mono is only interesting as an open-source product, that can be innovated upon by anyone, and that can be freely distributed. What is happening ? I already invested in Mono, I also switched to Gnome the whole network that I am managing, Gnome which is tainted with Novell's products. I am not the only one wondering: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061103073628401 Please Miguel ... give me an explanation on why this move was necessary, and also keep in mind that a lot of us value Free Software, and won't trade it for anything else. _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - Mono-list@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list